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In a very interesting article entitled "In the Face of Multiple Crises, There Is Reason to Be Optimistic", Danny Haiphong puts a case for revolutionary optimism.
Highlights?
- "Optimism would seem to be counterintuitive given the many crises facing millions of people in the U.S. and around the world. But optimism backed up by revolutionary thinking is just what is needed in this moment."
- "The most immediate antidote to nihilism is revolutionary optimism. Revolutionary optimism isn’t rooted in a blind hope that change will come at some unknown point in the future. It is cultivated by the acknowledgement that only through participation in the struggle to liberate the people can the lives of the people be transformed. Revolutionary optimism is bolstered by a deep curiosity in and knowledge of the history of class struggle."
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"Revolutionary optimism is not merely a mindset, but a duty to fulfill our commitment to liberation of the masses from an outmoded system in decline. And it isn’t simply reacting to a hope for a better future, either. Revolutionary optimism is realizable when a concrete analysis of concrete conditions leads to a higher level of consciousness that a better world is not just possible, but a process that is very much alive in the here and now."
I recall the journalist Simon Basketter wrote, “The Italian Marxist Antonio Gramsci argued that revolutionaries must stare reality in the face and find ways to push the class struggle forward. He borrowed the phrase, “pessimism of the intellect, optimism of the will” to deal with the problem. As a phrase it is a powerful warning against wishful thinking. And at the same time a cry against resignation. It proposes a determined, open-eyed engagement.”
Yanis Iqbal wrote, "Despite what seems as the “absoluteness of a dawning pessimism”, the spirit of revolutionary optimism never wilts under the onslaught of a vicious neoliberalism. The overarching history of Marxist revolutionary thought proves that through the cohesive combination of a critical concrete-real analysis and a dialectically illuminated optimistic will, a truly emancipatory praxis is possible."
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